Adapting to a warmer world

A wintertime quip is heard most every time a massive dump of snow engulfs Mount Hood and Government Camp:

So, this is global warming?

If the storm was so intense as to be judged uncommon and extreme, it just might be.

But don't tell that to the few remaining and shivering skeptics.

Now the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releases findings that say it is likely human-caused warming of the earth's atmosphere has caused and will increasingly cause weather extremes -- and with it risks to people and the infrastructure that supports modern life. Those weather extremes include record-setting high temperatures, the stuff of national headlines in recent years; and furious, sustained episodes of precipitation.

Michael Oppenheimer, the Princeton University astrophysicist who co-authored the findings, told reporters: "A hotter, moister atmosphere is an atmosphere primed to trigger disasters. As the world gets hotter, the risk gets higher."

Nothing in the IPPC's report comes as a particular shock. But the United Nations-sponsored panel, in narrowly reviewing what has been found in recent climate research, does help frame a public policy narrative designed to diminish risk to life as the world grows warmer -- and it has warmed up on land by more than a degree-and-a-half since the 1950s.

Are low-lying coastal areas of the United States, often colonized by less-than-mobile older residents in condominium developments, prepared for sea-level rise and the emergency response that weather disasters can require? Probably not. Are arid, water-challenged portions of the central and southwestern United States prepared to see manyfold more heat extremes of longer duration and record-setting intensity? Very likely not.

Already the Pacific Northwest is under stress.

Cascade glaciers, storehouses of water that keep rivers flowing through late summer, have shrunk. A recent Oregon State University study argues that southern Oregon's lodgepole pine forests, crippled by infestations of bark beetle, could be supplanted by other species more suited to the shifting climate -- this while certain forested areas of the state could in time turn entirely to sagebrush desert. The OSU team expects Pacific Northwest temperatures to rise substantially in the coming decades as diminished snowpack gives way to more winter rain and drier summers -- a potentially worrisome trend if growing pinot noir grapes hereabouts is your day job.

Inhabited, low-lying areas of Oregon's coast, meanwhile, need to gauge their capacities at moments of absolute highest tide -- and then some.

The value of the new IPPC report goes beyond signaling a yet greater need for nations to rein in their greenhouse gas emissions as worldwide population increases.

The report makes clear we are not adapting fast enough or planning to adapt smarter and later as the world grows warmer and as expanding urban centers concentrate poor populations, always hit hardest when natural calamity strikes. Land-use planning, water supply integrity, health care access and delivery, disaster warning and evacuation systems -- all are on the table for the tweaking.

It will take political courage to even mention such things in this tough economic climate. But it cannot wait as nations meet, as they have for 20 years and will do again next month in Africa, and fail to find a shared vision on limiting carbon dioxide releases.

Doom is not on the horizon. But being smart enough to limit the ravages of extreme weather is.